Welcome to the Nineteenth Century Studies Association website, where we hope you will find information about the Association, its interests and outlets, as well as enticements to join in the many conversations we have on and beyond these pages.

We are an interdisciplinary Association interested in exploring all aspects of the long nineteenth century, from science to music, from architecture to religion, from movement to literatures—and beyond. We hope you will peruse these pages as a volume inviting you to join us at our annual spring meeting, and we ask you to join our community of those with nineteenth century interests.

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Erika Wright is a lecturer in the Department of English at the University of Southern California and clinical instructor of family medicine at the Keck School of Medicine. She teaches courses on the British literature survey, Victorian fiction, women and literature, narrative medicine, and science fiction. Her book, Reading for Health: Medical Narratives and the Nineteenth-Century Novel(2016), argues that the excitement generated by therapeutic rhetoric—the turn in fiction and narrative theory to disease, crisis, and cure—overshadows the role that prevention and maintenance play in novels and medical texts. Erika’s new project, for which she earned a Mayers Fellowship at the Huntington Library, studies confidentiality law and medicine, specifically privileged communication and professional secrecy during the nineteenth century in fiction and the courts. Her other interests and publications focus on the use of fiction in medical education.

What was your favorite discovery / serendipitous moment when conducting research on the nineteenth century?I was on a research trip to the National Library of Medicine during . . .

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Meegan Kennedy is an Associate Professor of English and Core Faculty in History and Philosophy of Science at Florida State University, where she teaches Victorian literature, history of the novel, and the history of nineteenth-century science and medicine.

Her book,Revising the Clinic: Vision and Representation in Victorian Medical Narrative and the Novel(2010), studies physicians' and novelists' shared strategies for observing and recording the body. The book focuses on the developing debates over clinical realism; it’s newly reissued in paperback.

She recently received a yearlong NEH fellowship for her current project, “Beautiful Mechanism: The Bounds of Wonder in the Victorian Microscope,” which examines Victorians' fearful romance with this technology and what she calls the “skeptical sublime.” In other projects, she studies the social and intellectual networks of Victorian microscopy, andexamines the interplay in British novels and medicine between visual and numerical narratives (illustrations, figures, tables, and charts) and textual ones.

What was the last experience that made you a stronger scholar-teacher?A recent experience that made me a stronger scholar-teacher was working on the paper I gave on “Canada balsam” (the . . .

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Meri-Jane Rochelson, a past president of NCSA, is Professor Emerita of English at Florida International University, where she was affiliated with the programs in Women’s and Gender Studies and Jewish Studies. She is the author ofA Jew in the Public Arena: The Career of Israel Zangwill(2008), editor of Zangwill’s 1892 novelChildren of the Ghetto(1998), and co-editor ofTransforming Genres: New Approaches to British Fiction of the 1890s(1994). Meri-Jane has just completed a Broadview Edition of Israel Zangwill’s 1908 playThe Melting-Pot, which should be available for spring course adoption. A more personal monograph,Eli’s Story: A Twentieth-Century Jewish Life, is forthcoming next summer.

What was your most exciting nineteenth-century research discovery? My most exciting research discovery was finding a trove of approximately 300 letters and postcards from the late-Victorian fiction writer . . .

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Nathan K. Hensley is Assistant Professor of English at Georgetown University. His research focuses on nineteenth-century British literature, critical theory, environmental humanities, and the novel. Other interests include Anglophone modernism and the cultures of globalization. His first book project, Forms of Empire: The Poetics of Victorian Sovereignty (2016), explores how Victorian writers expanded the capacities of literary form to account for the ongoing violence of liberal modernity. A second project, now in its early stages, draws on Victorian and contemporary ecological thinking to investigate how the nineteenth century imagined systems and the failure of those systems. With Philip Steer (Massey University, NZ), he is currently co-editing a collection of essays, Ecological Form: System and Aesthetics in the Age of Empire(Fordham UP, forthcoming 2018). His scholarship has appeared in Victorian Studies, Novel: A Forum on Fiction, Nineteenth Century Contexts, Victorian Periodicals Review, and other venues.

In which directions do you think nineteenth-century scholarship should evolve in the near future?I think that nineteenth-century studies is in an amazingly strong . . .

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